‘DETROIT’: Missing the Story Among the Terror by Stephane Dunn

‘DETROIT’: Missing the Story Among the Terrorby Stephane Dunn | @DrStephaneDunn | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
End of the movie and I just sit there and do not move. My hands aren’t clutching the armrests or balled into furious fists. I do not join in the steady, yet subdued smatter of applause. A second or two, and I become aware that four of my five friend-comrades are on pause too. We glance at each other -  the ‘do I dare say it first’ mirrored in each. I catch the eye of a well-known, Black veteran producer and his wife as they rise to leave. I read this brother who ponders the bottom line of a film far more than I and know I’m not insane.
DETROIT is a not a very good film. It has the compelling subject -- the killing of three black men at the Algiers Motel during the Detroit riots in 1967, and an award winning talented director in Kathryn Bigelow, with her Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty collaborator Mark Boal, an Oscar winning screenplay writer. Unfortunately, the film may ride these elements all the way to movie award hype despite little that distinguishes it as either unique or exceptional.  
Not long after the visually interesting opening with Jacob Lawrence’s brilliant Black migration story art, DETROIT begins wandering afield, in search of its story direction -- which it never quite finds -- ultimately descending into a messy, confusing, unintentional horror story.
No, this is not about that ongoing debate – whether White directors should helm so called ‘Black’ stories though the historically racist, and exclusionary nature of Hollywood understandably gives rise to that question. There absolutely has been a number of problematic cinematic stories addressing race, slavery, and the Civil Rights Movement that elicit such concerns; the race film and classical Hollywood era evidence this.  This is no trite matter about racial identification at the level of skin color.  Whose subjectivity, whose voice or perspective is privileged?; in other words, whose story is it and to what effect? Lastly, how is the story executed cinematically, including how the story is shot, framed, begun, developed and concluded, how are characters treated?
DETROIT could have been good, but an able cast, director and screenwriter, and compelling subject material don’t negate key problems with storytelling and execution. Except for Larry (Algee Smith), the aspiring musician who survives, the narrative gives nary a glance at who the Black male survivors are and the lives of the three teens killed, Carl Cooper, Aubrey Pollard, and Fred Temple. These young men are literally dead bodies on the floor, props manipulated to showcase the spectacle of the White Detroit cops, most notably the  young cop, Krauss (Will Poulter).
This redneck police caricature is the dominating voice and character portrayal in the long, long sequence at the hotel when the patrons are pressed against a wall and Krauss rants, raves, threatens, and brutalizes endlessly. Julie and Karen, the White party girls at the hotel, are slapped around and derided for screwing Black men; their  roles as objects of Black men’s sexual desire are hardly complex, but they are accorded significant prominence.
The film offers a cameo-like treatment of other elements; light Motown references to surprisingly weak representative music and Black folk dancing and partying it up. Tropes and extremes, like the good White cop, the pissed off captain declaring Krauss racist, and another good white cop helping one of the released Algiers Motel victims when he crawls out of the woods  terrified, and begging for help, make appearances. Versatile actor Anthony Mackie is relegated to a frustratingly brief but arresting literal cameo as a soldier staying at the hotel who then disappears from the narrative.
More frustrating, the representation of the mysterious Black watchman Dismukes (John Boyega). Is he the hero? At first, it appears he is going to be at the least that, trying to prevent the White cops from harming the other Black people at the hotel, but then he becomes strangely more witness and forced[?] accomplice.
This is one of the film narrative’s essential problems. There is no Black hero or Black agency, only super bad cops and cops that aren’t like them. The arrest and subsequent trial of the three white cops involved in terrorizing and killing the Algiers Motel inhabitants along with the Black watchman follows disjointed pieces of interrogation and inexplicable conclusions. Viewers unfamiliar with this history are put at a disadvantage.
There is a moment in the film that is an apt metaphor for the treatment of Black agency and perspective. The White female mortician gets what is supposed to register as a poignant screen moment with the grieving father. The families of the dead men, barely exist throughout the film. While the coroner sits and speaks to the father, the grandmother presumably is left standing there, mute, looking on – which is pretty much where Black women are in the whole of the film. Ironically Black women figure prominently historically in the demands of some of the victims’ families for some kind of reckoning about what happened to their loved one at the motel.  
The “A” story in DETROIT is the Algiers Motel killings, which occurred in the midst of the city's infamous 1967 race riot; as a movie, we should accept that it is a dramatization that turns on fact and fiction, but the loose handling of the historical narrative is not something that should be ignored. The trailer for DETROIT is edited well to suggest that it is a scintillating drama that will live up to the hype, but the film doesn’t deliver -- and may do more harm than good. 
It is not a 'Black story' framed through a Black perspective simply because of the prominence of Black characters and Black culturalisms. It is not a "Black story" simply because it centers on the violent racist horrors carried out by the police on Black bodies. A 'Black story" provides serious glimpses on screen of how the ones that die and survive breathe, live, dream, resist and are loved before, during, and after the horror; DETROIT fails to tell that story.
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S​tephane Dunn is a writer and professor and the director of the  Morehouse College Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies Program​ (CTEMS). Her ​publications include the 2008 book Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (U of Illinois) and a number of articles in mediums such as Ebony.com, The Atlantic, The Root.com, Bright Lights Film journal, and others.  Follow her on Twitter at twitter @DrStephaneDunn and www.stephanedunn.com.